Perledo

Until 1757 the comune was not called Perledo but Monte di Varenna, which is exactly what it is: the mountain above Varenna, on the eastern shore of Lake Como. The territory rises from about two hundred metres at the water to over thirteen hundred towards the Grigne, and much of it falls inside the park of the northern Grigna; the fossils found here have added to the scientific knowledge of the whole Lario area. The name appears for the first time in 769, in documents concerning the territory dependent on Varenna. In the twelfth century the old pieve broke up into the settlements that still make up the comune — Regolo, Regoledo, Bologna, Gisazio, Gittana, Tondello, Vezio — while the castle of Vezio remained under the jurisdiction of Varenna. Then came the Della Torre and the Visconti, and from 1395 the duchy of Milan.

The comune once used a coat of arms with the iron crown, on the strength of a legendary tradition linking Perledo to queen Theodelinda: a story with no documentary support. The present arms, granted in 1993, go back instead to an older emblem recorded in the Vallardi armorial collection. In the hamlets there is also a painter to follow: Giovanni Battista Fumeo, who came from Regoledo, left an altarpiece of 1609 in the church of San Bernardo at Bologna, another at Santa Maria Maddalena in Gisazio and a Madonna and Child at San Lorenzo, in his own village. The parish church of San Martino was already a parish at the end of the thirteenth century and keeps the lower part of its Romanesque bell tower; at Vezio, the church of Sant'Antonio abate holds a frescoed triptych of 1458. And along the Esino torrent, on the Sentiero del Viandante, stands the sixteenth-century mill that ground the village's flour, buckwheat and chestnut above all, and worked until after the war.